Summer of PvP

Last week Keith surprised us with the unexpected release of a road map for summer. The reason this was as surprising as it was is that Bioware usually likes to make announcements about announcements for teasers first, so them just dropping something like that without warning is rather unusual.

I read through it before anyone else had a chance to talk to me about it and my first thought was that there were probably going to be a lot of complaints about too much focus on PvP and about how nobody thinks of the poor, neglected solo players, and when I looked around on forums and social media later, that seemed to have been right on the money.

There is very little talk of actual new content coming out any time soon. There is mention of more companion returns, "a completely new storyline" as well as "new characters to meet and planets to explore in the new year", but that's all still very far off (autumn/winter) and vague. I don't really count things like Nar Shaddaa Nightlife returning once again or another week of double (C)XP as content, even if they are nice.

The only definitives we have to look forward to in the near future are:

- A new stronghold set on Rishi
- A new arena (I think it was previously mentioned that this would be set in Shae Vizla's Mandalorian compound on Rishi) and a new Huttball map set "in the dangerous and dizzying heights of an industrial planet" (guesses as to said planet's identity that I've seen so far range from Corellia to Vandin).

Aside from that, there was some talk about quality of life improvements, which are always nice to see but which aren't a complete replacement for actual content. Also, apart from a mention of "big updates for guilds" later in the year, the upcoming changes are all PvP focused and again somewhat vague. I'll hazard a guess at what some of them might mean:

- Convert more, if not all, of our Warzones and Arenas to allow cross-faction grouping: Okay, this one is pretty clear except for some wiggle room in terms of what exactly "more, if not all" will turn out to be. This is the one thing I'm actually not keen on at all, because yes, I care about roleplaying in my PvP - crazy, huh? That's to say: I'm fine with making some more warzones cross-faction where this makes sense, which is to say in Huttball and in the arenas. I'm not keen on the idea of the factions mingling randomly in warzones that have traditionally been explicitly about the Empire-Republic conflict. However, I could see Bioware perceiving a certain necessity for this, as some of the other changes they are alluding to actually risk increasing queue times (see below).

- We’re investigating ways of improving the experience of all Warzones: This is about as vague as it can get, but my personal hope is that it means that they are looking into addressing the desync issues that have plagued the game's PvP for a while and which have gotten considerably worse over the past couple of years. I tried to find some great videos/gifs again that I'd seen on reddit about this in the past and couldn't find them right now, but for those who've never experienced desync, it means that your game client and the game servers can have some pretty violent disagreements about what's happening in any given situation. The effects of this are worst in Huttball, where you might find yourself passing to someone just to watch that person suddenly teleport somewhere completely different so that you look like an idiot who just passed into empty space for no reason. Similarly you might leap towards the ball carrier in Queshball and suddenly have them vanish and re-appear on a completely different floor, which is very hard to recover from. I've had both of those happen to me and they are highly discouraging. We can only hope.

- We’re taking an in-depth look at our unranked PvP matchmaking system overall to see what kinds of improvements we can make to better ensure every match is a good one: Another very vague one, but here my guess is that they are looking into role-balancing, which currently isn't a thing in unranked at all. The goal would obviously be to avoid matches where one side has four healers and the other has none. While I've had some pretty memorable games with setups like that, I can't disagree that it would be better to have balance, though I dread the effect this might have on queue times for healers if there aren't enough or too many queuing for your respective faction. Then again, I suppose the increased cross-faction queuing is probably meant to address this.

- We’re also exploring giving unranked players more queue control over which Warzones and Arenas they want to play: While still somewhat vague, this one is a bit clearer and basically talking about a feature that people have been requesting since launch: to queue specifically for the warzone(s) they want or at least to be able to exclude one or two that they really hate. There is a reason this has been rejected for years, and that has been queue times (and risk of enforced monotony for those who queue for everything just because x people don't like Huttball for example). I'm not sure why it would be feasible now, even with cross-faction queuing, but I guess Keith intentionally used language that doesn't commit them to anything ("we're also exploring...").

- We’ll be focusing attention on exploiters, cheaters, and adjusting how Ranked Warzones complete: This one is straightforward and I'm glad to hear it, especially after I managed to go for years without running into any genuine hackers/cheaters but recently encountered one twice within the course of only a few months. People running through walls and forcefields or teleporting themselves inside a wall to AoE their opponents from an unreachable position suck.

- Finally, the Rishi stronghold as well as some changes to the way decorations work will be set up with an eye on supporting duelling tournaments and such. My first thought on reading this was "Are they actually implementing this just for Snave?" but I'm guessing there must be other people arranging events like these on occasion... I don't really see this being very relevant to me, but at least it's kind of original I guess? Or are there any other MMOs out there that encourage you to build custom PvP areas?

All in all, I agree that this road map is particularly thin on concrete information, but then the early summer months are traditionally the least busy season for MMOs so I can't claim to find this shocking or terribly disappointing. Also, while I'm not a huge PvPer, it is a part of the game that I quite enjoy (even if it's on a more casual basis), so I'm happy to see and test whatever changes they come up with.